Blog of Holding

here’s a solo monster that doesn’t get repetitive

July 6th, 2011

I ran a solo monster that one of my players described as “maybe too gross”, which means, success! I thought I’d share it in case you want to disturb your players.

I’m not providing specific attack and damage numbers, since I just ran it using Monster Manual 3 on a business card. I made it a 14th-level solo, but it should work at any level.

Description: The creature was found in the throne room of a once-magnificent ghoul-infested palace. It’s a large, twisted collection of bodies, body parts, and palace treasure, all in roughly human form: each of its arms is a whole person, bending at the waist like an elbow and using arms like fingers; its stomach is a barrel of brandy; and its head looks at first to be tiny, but it’s just a regular-sized human head on the top of a huge, bulky body. Instead of a jawbone, it has a hand, the fingers of which each end with a tooth.

The monster’s left shoulder is a golden chest with a key in the lock, and the animate corpse who forms its left arm is attached to the lid of the box. The creature has been impaled through-and-through with a golden harpoon, which doesn’t seem to have slowed it down.

Note: This is a lot of information to give the players. I shared out the details, like the cask and the harpoon, over several rounds.

Actions: This was a solo monster, so I had it roll 2 initiatives.

On the first initiative, the monster made a pretty normal attack: a level-appropriate slam that targeted 1 or 2 adjacent creatures.

On the second initiative, it would do something unique and creepy every round. This was the round that really bothered the players.

Round 1: The dangling body of a harlequin, missing its head, raises a flute to a different head, and plays a tune. This is a will attack that causes the target to make a basic attack on an ally. (In my game, this attack critted, so I ruled that it became a Dominate (save ends) rather than a single basic attack.)
Round 2: A beautiful courtesan lodged in the creature’s back takes out a bottle of perfume and sprays it (blast 3, fortitude attack). Anyone hit must kiss the courtesan as a minor action (possibly spending a move action to approach) or take 15 damage at end of their next turn.
Round 3: A protruding chainmail hand dislodges the golden harpoon and throws it. It’s a +3 spear.
Round 4: the jaw-hand comes out of the mouth (extending unnaturally far, giving this attack reach) and makes a non-damaging Grab attack. If the target is grabbed, they are pulled adjacent to the monster, next to its mouth.
Round 5: If a target is still Grabbed from round 4, the mouth bites them, doing massive damage. If not, the monster roars in frustration, coating people in necrotic spittle (blast 5, low necrotic damage).
Round 6: 2 legs hanging from the creature’s torso wrap around an adjacent target (a Grab and damage).
Round 7: A dead, unconscious, or bloodied target (in that order or preference) is grabbed and stuffed into the creature’s body (with appropriate gross sound effects). If the creature is unconscious, it may make escape attempts on its turn.
Round 8 and on: Anyone grabbed on round 6 (alive or dead) is forced to reach out of the creature and make a basic attack.

After around 8, the monster is out of tricks, but battles don’t usually go that long anyway. If they do, things are probably getting boring, so I planned to have the monster start shedding body parts and losing hit points.

Natural 1s: If any PC rolled a natural 1 on a melee attack on the creature, it got an immediate action that let it move its full movement in a straight line, through opponents. Anyone in the way suffered a Fortitude attack or was knocked prone and took a little damage. This let the creature break out of flanks and occasionally threaten ranged opponents.

Bloodied: Like many recent boss monsters, all status effects on the creature ended when it became bloodied.

Countermeasures: The PCs could tinker with the creature in various ways to hurt it.

If a successful Thievery check was made on the golden box in its left shoulder, the lid would come off, along with the attached left arm. After that, the creature would only be able to target one creature, instead of two, with its main attack. (My PCs tried this several times but failed the thievery check.)

If the PCs pulled out the golden harpoon, they got a +3 spear/javelin, and prevented the special attack on round 3.

If the PCs turned the spigot on the barrel in the monster’s stomach, high-quality brandy would run out, filling every square the creature occupied for the rest of the battle. If the PCs decided to light the brandy on fire, it would do damage to any creature in a brandy-soaked square.

Posted in 4e D&D, advice/tools, play, RPG Hub | 2 Comments »

What’s at the center of your game world?

July 4th, 2011

Molten core, just like earth.

It’s hollow, with a floating sun in the center making a perennial noon, and the concave surface of the hollow earth is populated with exotic tropical creatures (possibly dinosaurs, Barsoomians, or snake-men).

The 666 levels of Hell. The surface of the earth is a thin skin, blessed by the gods to keep the infernal legions from boiling out into the universe. That’s why, whenever dwarves dig too deep, they hit a vein of balrogs.

An interlocking megadungeon millions of levels deep, each more dangerous than the last. Dungeon level 1 is mostly inhabited by level 1 monsters, dungeon level 2 by level 2 monsters, etc. If each dungeon level is, on average, 20 feet deep, and the radius of the world is 41,000,000 feet, the creature slumbering in the deepest dungeon chamber is level 2 million (or has 2 million hit dice, depending on edition).

Nothing – my game world is flat.

Molten chocolate core.

Other (described in the comments):

Posted in fluff/inspiration, RPG Hub | 11 Comments »

the dungeon where everyone hears everything

July 1st, 2011

The Land of the Thomas Covenant books is filled with little magical conveniences. One is a council room with great acoustics, so that everyone can hear everyone else and no one has to shout.

This would actually be a good gimmick for a dungeon. The party could split up, if they needed to, and the players could still talk to each other around the table. This would remove an annoying restriction that usually plagues groups where some party members are away (or dead).

For every convenience, there’s a complication. The dungeon would contain a rival adventuring group. They’d be able to hear every word from the PCs’ mouths. Conversely, the PCs would be able to hear every word, grunt, and shout from the rival party.

The DM would have to prepare a few set-pieces to narrate: the rival party encountering a puzzle, a battle, a crossroads, or just talking trash to the PCs. Some of the rivals’ words would, of course, be calculated to deceive.

Tags: everybook
Posted in fluff/inspiration, news, RPG Hub | 1 Comment »

ancient junk in Gamma World

June 29th, 2011

Gamma world has exciting technological treasures (omega tech), but it also has an extensive Ancient Artifacts table that is, well, puzzling. It has a lot of the kind of items that the writers could see from their cubicles: hand lotion, mp3 players, etc. It’s a big percentile table that was included instead of the 4e rules on, say, charging, or recovering from unconsciousness.

It’s really hard to know what to do with any of this ancient garbage, but nevertheless, during character creation, you spend a lot of time determining exactly which junk you have. I actually chose to forgo a lot of my rolls on the Ancient Artifacts table. Then, during gameplay, we figured out what it could be used for. Ancient artifacts are currency.

We decided that the Dabblers (tech-loving raccoons) run stores, but they’re based on the barter system. You can get something you want (fuel for your motorcycle, ammunition) if you can get them sufficiently interested in the ancient He-Man lunchbox you dug up. We ran an entire barter-based session around acquiring cordless mice and a piece from a nonfunctional microwave from a dabbler warehouse (called “Beast Buy”: one of the players named it as a joke, and the GM went with it).

Posted in other systems, RPG Hub | 5 Comments »

Sweet Character Portraits for My Little Pony RPG

June 26th, 2011

The My Little Ponies RPG!

So it’s been almost 5 years since WotC released the My Little Pony RPG, and I’ve made it all the way to 17th level (my group usually only meets once a month or so).

I am not much of an artist, so I never bothered making a character portrait for my sweet bronie. Luckily, my friend Anna has stepped up to the plate, making character portraits for not only me but also the other PCs in the game! Check out the portraits in her blog for Rory (me), Scott, and Alison.

Notice her attention to detail with our cutie marks!

Posted in other systems, RPG Hub | 8 Comments »

or they could be robots

June 24th, 2011

In Book 1 of the Thomas Covenant series, there’s a unit of 500 elite soldiers who are sworn to immortal service to a kingdom. The soldiers don’t age: they can only die in battle, or if they break their oath.

Such a unit are just as interesting as their oath of service. They’re totally trustworthy – to follow the letter of the oath.

If they’re sworn to serve and protect the king of a country, they can’t, of course, assassinate the king – but if the king’s younger brother performs the assassination, they will immediately transfer their loyalty to the murderer. If a userper takes the throne and performs the necessary rituals of kingship, who will they follow?

If their oath is to the king’s family, not to the Crown, they will keep on fighting after the king is deposed. After all but a handful are slaughtered, a few might decide that they can best serve the rightful king by spiriting him away and going in exile with him.

Imagine a young woman who doesn’t know her parentage. She’s served by two middle-aged servants who both exhibit motherly concern for her, and who have taught her considerable skill with weapons. At a certain age she’ll start to wonder why her servants have never appeared to age, and why she’s never had to pay them.

Tags: everybook
Posted in news, RPG Hub | 1 Comment »

The Shadowfell: Gloomwrought – Roleplaying with Candles

June 23rd, 2011

I ran a session using D&D 4e’s The Shadowfell: Gloomwrought supplement yesterday. It was pretty fun! I introduced the players to the creepy crucified corpse at the intersection of five roads that points in the direction the PCs want to go and to the House of Black Lanterns, an inn for travelers that always seems to appear suddenly out of the mist.

In addition to the NPCs in the book, I also threw in some of my own inventions for inhabitants of the inn like an old city guard braving the shadowfell to help her granddaughter find her lost husband (who had been taken by banderhobbs) and a down on his luck hill giant who has grown weary of life in the Shadowfell.

In order to reinforce the mood of the gloomy Shadowfell, I used a single candle as a light source during the game (along with some last shreds of daylight).

Here are my reactions from using a candle while roleplaying:

Everything is gloomy: The relative darkness and flickering candlelight combined to make a pretty somber atmosphere. This was good and bad in that it reinforced the creepiness of the Shadowfell, but it also sucked some of the energy out of the session. I think I might have been able to maintain the energy more if the party was in a haunted or particularly dangerous location where something could attack them at any moment or if they were engaged in a fight with ghosts and horrible undead, but since they were traveling on a road and then later spent the night at an inn it was hard to really maintain a creepy tension so instead everything just seemed a little sadder and more subdued. I suppose I could have tried to hype up what was essentially a non threatening situation and I did a little bit, but ultimately it didn’t feel super appropriate to do so, especially at the inn, which is supposed to be a haven for travelers in the Shadowfell.
It is hard to see: Yep. No surprise here. For a game that requires looking at your stats or a die roll every ten seconds, it is definitely a detriment not to be able to see well.
I don’t want to hit the candle over: I was a little worried about hitting the candle over during the session and spilling wax on someone’s character sheet or something. I could see this being an even bigger concern during combat, when everyone is moving miniatures around and rolling a lot of dice. I am running a combat next week, so I will let you know how it goes!

Posted in 4e D&D, RPG Hub | 6 Comments »

don’t plan it, He-Man it

June 22nd, 2011

When modern archaeologists excavate a site, they don’t dig everything up; they take samples. They do it because they have limited time and resources, and because they want to leave something for future researchers to examine.

That’s something I should remind myself while doing DM worldbuilding.

A complete archaeological excavation determines what’s present at a site, but it also determines what isn’t. A complete excavation would kill some of the magic of a site – strip it of its last mystery.

It’s a lesson that’s hard to learn. I’m the kind of person who feels the impulse to map out the whole D&D world, and determine where each monster lives – and which monsters don’t exist in my campaign.

Instead of that, I’m trying to switch to a core-sample approach, using the PCs as the core drill. We learn a lot about the PCs’ immediate area. Beyond that, there’s a lot of room left for future excavation.

The Chekhov Model

Years ago, I had the idea that everything had to be planned before you started a campaign. If your 3e campaign has a race of highly intelligent creatures who masquerade as ceilings (Cloaker, average Intelligence 14), surely a few Cloakers would have moved to the city and work as university professors or something. Like Chekhov’s Gun, every campaign element has to be introduced up front.

The He Man Model

The thing is, he actually had many faces.

I’ve moved from Chekhov to a more appropriate literary model: He Man and the Masters of the Universe. He Man didn’t start with a huge cast of characters: it introduced new characters whenever the writers (or toymakers) thought of one. Where was Man-E-Faces before he was featured in an episode? Offscreen somewhere. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars chronicles follow a similar model. Burroughs introduced a new continent, complete with a color-coded humanoid race, every time he needed an idea for his next book.

I’m trying to He-Man it from now on. I’m not banning dragonborn, for instance, but I’m not killing myself to detail their location in the world, either. If someone wants to be a dragonborn, maybe we’ll figure it out.

Halflings are a different story. Those little bastards are GONE.

Posted in fluff/inspiration, game design, RPG Hub | 3 Comments »

what I learned from drawing the Monster Manual creatures

June 20th, 2011

From drawing all the Monster Manual creatures, I learned that some areas are not well suited for some PCs. For instance, you’re hard pressed to find any civilized opponents above level 10, or feywild creatures below level 6. I think that’s a feature, not a bug.

RPG video games where the encounters auto-level annoy me. I prefer video games with leveled zones, so I can move on to the next challenge when I feel I’m ready. In D&D it’s no different. If I was forced to pick, I’d rather have the world map marked out with levels, like an old-school dungeon map, than always be surrounded by monsters of exactly my level.

While both assumptions strain credibility, I posit that there is a speck of verisimilitude to be found in the “leveled world” hypothesis. Some wildernesses of the world ARE more dangerous than others. The Australian outback, where every animal seems to have the world’s deadliest poison, is more dangerous than Yellowstone. I hate to stone cold disrespect the grizzly bears like that, but there it is. Box jellyfish alone are way more dangerous than bears, never mind Australia’s 20-foot poisonous laser crocodiles.

a leveled world

If I create a level 11 area, does that mean that it’s brimming with level 11 villagers and farmers? No. I propose that the level of an area be the level of its most common PREDATORS. In D&D, villagers are at the bottom of the food chain – they’re PREY. Someone nearby – the king’s guard if they’re lucky, vampires or orc hordes if they’re unlucky – is more powerful than they.
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in 4e D&D, fluff/inspiration, RPG Hub | 2 Comments »

Conquest or Nerath Review (from someone who just purchased the game)

June 19th, 2011

Having just purchased and never played Conquest of Nerath, I would say I am in a good position to review it. Because, you know, I’ll be objective or something:

Basic Impression: Conquest of Nerath is your classic light to medium complexity war-game with a number of notable D&D themed twists! In terms of complexity, I would say it is notably more complex than Risk and a little less complex than Axis and Allies. Read the rest of this entry »